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Carriers are scrambling right now as they see OTT services such as Skype and WhatsApp eating into their revenues. In a conversation with David Walsh (pictured), GENBAND’s new CEO, we discussed how OTT players have taken 30% of voice traffic in seven years and how service provider voice growth is now around 3% per year.

In response to this onslaught of new competition, carriers have come together to develop standards which will allow their telecom equipment to run on off-the-shelf servers so they can more effectively compete with their app-based competitors. This initiative: network functions virtualization or NFV will help turn hardware-based telcos into software telcos allowing them to be more flexible in rolling out new offerings while saving money in the process.

Many conference calls in the corporate world start with lots of beeping and questions. “Did someone just join?” “Hello?” “Who just came on?” Occasionally you also get the stray person from another corporate department that joins by accident. All of this non-core communication to get to the actual call is wasteful and kills productivity. Of course it gives the people on the call extra time to update their Facebook profiles and check out the day’s news but most companies likely are looking to reduce this time-wasting taken for granted as part of the typical conference.

Being able to determine global trends before others is an amazing way to increase your chance for success and no one has better access to the needs and desires of the world users than Google. In 2003 just before blogging became all the rage, the company reached out and purchased Weblog software to help create its Blogger platform. Just before video became super-popular on the web, the company launched its own video search service to compete with YouTube. Google determined this move did not slow its competitors growth so the search engine company purchased the leading video distribution company.

John Battelle summed up Google’s access to people’s wants and desires very well in his book The Search which I reviewed in 2006.

“What’s good for windows phones will be good for the Windows ecosystem,” said Steve Ballmer to CNBC regarding the company’s acquisition of Nokia’s services and device business. He went on to explain that this deal will help Lenovo and Dell. Of course he said this precisely because this strategy is going to cause problems with Microsoft’s relationship with other hardware manufacturers the company relies on. The goal of course is to the thread the needle – similar to Google, by producing hardware and licensing Android to others.

Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will pay EUR 3.79 billion to purchase substantially all of Nokia’s Devices & Services business, and EUR 1.65 billion to license Nokia’s patents, for a total transaction price of EUR 5.44 billion in cash.

Steve Ballmer has just announced he will be stepping down from Microsoft in the next twelve months and for his many critics, this is triumphant news. The happiest critic will likely be the author of the Mini-Microsoft blog I first reported on in 2005. The author, a Microsoft Employee was never a fan of the management and in a post today outlined the challenges regarding the timing of this announcement – it follows a restructuring which may have to be restructured yet again under another CEO. Moreover he goes on to suggest the next leader actually have programming experience.

The pace of entrepreneurial activity fueled by tech wealth isn’t slowing down… In fact it is accelerating at dare I say “Internet speed.” Just last week I discussed how Tech Leaders Brin, Zuckerberg and Bezos are changing everything as the seek to revolutionize newspapers, immigration and meat production.

The Financial Times seems to agree as they just published a piece yesterday which discusses many of the same issues I brought up with the addition of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop and asteroid mining.

The FT correctly discusses the pervasive pessimism about the lack of investment from just a few years back from people like PayPal’s Peter Thiel as well as Tyler Cowen.

Here is a salient excerpt:

The upshot, according to supporters of this billionaire-fuelled quest for the next big technological breakthroughs, will be an age of discovery that creates the industries of the future: private space exploration, new forms of transport, robotics, new medicines and advanced materials.

The contact center is a billion dollar channel but has yet to exploit its true potential. Contact center data can now drive demand through another channel, online. To drive brand and business equity today, marketers must leverage consumer insights to create seamless experiences across channels where each interaction, regardless of channel, is relevant and consistent to lead consumers along the path to purchase.

In the late nineties it was fashionable to say the web would kill the contact center as people would no longer need to speak on the phone when purchasing.

It’s getting to be laughable – the phone choices in the Android camp are literally becoming infinite from Samsung alone – let alone when you throw in Google, HTC and others. Apple popularized the mouse, the GUI, fonts, desktop publishing and so many things yet they eventually got killed in the late eighties and nineties because of the competition and their lack of correct response to it.

In other words the price/performance curve got so out of whack that when PCs became commoditized and Apple lost its software ecosystem advantage, it didn’t make financial sense to buy an Apple product.

In 2010 I predicted this would happen to Apple in the smartphone market when I saw the gloriously huge Motorola Droid X. At the time I said the following (bold added for emphasis):

In the last few years there has been an incredible display of tech leaders transcending the status quo and jumping into new markets with both feet. Sometimes they do this with financing alone and other times they exert elbow grease.

Google is a great example of a company that constantly pushes the envelope… They are involved in green energy, self-driving cars and wearable technology – pushing forward in all these areas to create new markets. Amazon showed the world the power of ecommerce but also of cloud computing where they not only were responsible for pushing this market into the mainstream but also for reducing prices so quickly that some competitors are scrambling to stay in the game.